Diary — May 2015

John Baez

Here Greg Egan has drawn two regular dodecahedra, in red and blue.
They share some corners—and these are the corners of a cube,
shown in green!

I learned some cool facts about this from Adrian Ocneanu when I was at
Penn State. First some easy stuff. You can take some corners of a
regular dodecahedron and make them into the corners of a cube. But
not every symmetry of the cube is a symmetry of the dodecahedron! If
you give the cube a 90° rotation around any face, you get a new
dodecahedron. Check it out: doing this rotation switches the red and
green dodecahedra. These are called twin dodecahedra.

But there are actually 5 different ways to take a regular dodecahedron
and make them into the corners of a cube, as shown here. And each one
gives your dodecahedron a different twin! So, a dodecahedron actually
has 5 twins.

But here's the cool part. Suppose you take one of these twins. It,
too, will have 5 twins. One of these will be the dodecahedron you
started with. But the other 4 will be new dodecahedra: that is,
dodecahedra rotated in new ways.

How many different dodecahedra can you get by continuing to take
twins? Infinitely many!

In fact, we can draw a graph—a thing with dots and
edges—that explains what's going on. Start with a dot for our
original dodecahedron. Draw dots for all the dodecahedra you can get
by repeatedly taking twins. Connect two dots with an edge if and only
if they are twins of each other.

The resulting graph is a tree: in other words, it has no loops in it!
If you start at your original dodecahedron, and keep walking along
edges of this graph by taking twins, you'll never get back to where
you started except by undoing all your steps.

Ocneanu sketched the proof to me, and I reconstructed the rest
with a lot of help from Greg Egan, Ian Agol and others:

It's part of an elaborate and beautiful story which also involves the
golden ratio, the quaternions, and 4-dimensional shapes like the 4-simplex, which has
5 tetrahedral faces, and the 600-cell, which has 600
tetrahedral faces!

Here are some puzzles.

You can choose some corners of a cube and make them into the
corners of a regular tetrahedron. You can fit 2 tetrahedra in the
cube this way. These are a bit like the 5 cubes in the dodecahedron,
but there's a big difference.

Here's the difference. In the first case, every symmetry of the
tetrahedron is a symmetry of the cube it's in. But in the second case
not every symmetry of the cube is a symmetry of the dodecahedron.
That's why we get 'twin dodecahedra' but not 'twin cubes'.

Puzzle 1: If you inscribe a tetrahedron in a cube and then
inscribe the cube in a dodecahedron, is every symmetry of the
tetrahedron a symmetry of the dodecahedron?

Puzzle 2: How many ways are there to inscribe a tetrahedron in
a dodecahedron? More precisely: how many ways are there to choose
some corners of a regular dodecahedron and have them be the corners of
a regular tetrahedron?

You can see the answers to the these in comments to my G+ post.
The second one is also answered in my next diary entry!

Here Greg Egan has drawn a dodecahedron with 5 tetrahedra in it. This
picture is 'left-handed': if you look at where the 5 tetrahedra meet,
you'll see they swirl counterclockwise as you go out! If you view
this thing in a mirror you'll get a right-handed version.

Putting them together, you get a dodecahedron with 10 tetrahedra in
it:

The two kinds of tetrahedra are colored yellow and cyan. Regions
belonging to both are colored magenta. It's pretty — but it's hard to
see the tetrahedra, because they overlap a lot!

Jos Leys blends mathematics and art in a delightful way. You don't
need to know math to enjoy this picture. It's a whimsical and
mysterious landscape. The bright colors make it clownish, but the
shadows make it a bit eerie: the sun is setting, and who knows what
happens here at night! You can see more here:

On the other hand, from the title of this gallery you can see there's
math here. And trying to understand this math will lead you on quite
a journey. Let me sketch it here... I apologize for going rather
fast.

A Kleinian
group is a discrete subgroup of the group called \(\mathrm{PSL}(2,
\mathbb{C})\). This group shows up in many ways in math and physics.

Physicists call it the Lorentz group: it's
the group generated by rotations and Lorentz transformations, which
acts as symmetries in special relativity.

In math, it's called the group of Möbius
transformations or 'fractional linear transformations'. Those are
transformations like this:

$$ z \mapsto \frac{az + b}{cz + d} $$

where \(z\) is a complex number and so are \(a,b,c,d\). These can be
seen as transformations of the Riemann sphere: the
complex plane together with a point at infinity. They are, in fact,
precisely all the conformal transformations of the Riemann sphere: the
transformations that preserve angles.

But this group \(\mathrm{PSL}(2,\mathbb{C})\) also acts as conformal
transformations of a 3-dimensional ball whose boundary is the Riemann
sphere! And that's important for understanding this picture.

(In physics, this ball is the set of 'mixed states' for a spin-1/2
particle, and the sphere, its boundary, consists of the 'pure states'.
Lorentz transformations act on the mixed states, and they act on the
pure states. But you don't need to know this stuff.)

If you take any point inside the ball and act on it by all the
elements in a Kleinian group — a discrete subgroup of
\(\mathrm{PSL}(2,\mathbb{C})\) — you'll get a set \(S\) of points in
the ball. The set of points in the Riemann sphere that you can
approach by a sequence of points in \(S\) is called a limit set of the
Kleinian group. And this set can look really cool!

In these pictures, Jos Leys has systematically but rather artificially
taken these cool-looking subsets of the Riemann sphere and puffed them
up into 3-dimensional spaces: puffing a circle into a sphere, and so
on. This makes the picture nicer, but doesn't have a deep
mathematical meaning.

Later, Jos Leys took a deeper approach, using quaternions to make
limit sets that are truly 3-dimensional. You can seem some here:

This is a place called Hephaestus
Fossae, on the northern hemisphere of Mars. The image has been
colored to show the elevation: green and yellow shades represent
shallow ground, while blue and purple stand for deep depressions, as
much as 4 kilometers deep.

You can see a few dozen impact craters, some small and some big, up to
20 kilometers across. But I'm sure you instantly noticed the cool
part: the long and intricate canyons and riverbeds. These were
created by the same impact that made the largest crater!

When a comet or an asteroid crashes at high speed into a planet, the
collision dramatically heats up the surface at the impact site. In
the case of the large crater seen in this image, the heat melted the
soil — a mixture of rock, dust and also, hidden deep down, water ice
— resulting in a massive flood. And before drying up, this hot mud
carved a complex pattern of channels while flowing across the planet's
surface!

The melted rock-ice mixture also made the debris blankets surrounding
the largest crater. Since there aren't similar structures near the
small craters in this image, scientists believe that only the most
powerful impacts were able to dig deep enough to release part of the
frozen reservoir of water lying beneath the surface.

Why is it called 'Hephaestus Fossae'? Hephaestus was the Greek god of
fire. Fossae are channels or canyons. So it's a good name.

Puzzle: about when did this large impact occur?

I don't know!

This picture was taken by the high-resolution stereo camera on ESA.s
Mars Express orbiter on 28 December 2007, and my post is paraphrased
from this article:

The passengers wait eagerly in the ornate lobby of the enormous
spaceport. Soon, a signal indicates that their spaceship is ready for
boarding. As they wait, special displays instruct them about how their
spaceship functions and what to expect once they leave Earth's
atmosphere. Aboard the giant spacecraft — as luxuriously appointed as
any yacht — they are soon on their way to a vacation on the Moon.

No, this isn't a vision of the future of space tourism. It's what
happened in 1901, when people could pay a princely half dollar for a
ticket to ride into space.

[...]

Thompson spared no expense in creating the illusion of a trip to the
Moon. To house his show, he erected an eighty-foot-high,
40,000-square-foot building that for sheer opulence put European opera
houses to shame. It cost a staggering $84,000 to construct... at a
time when a comfortable home could be built for $2000.

For fifty cents — twice the price of any other attraction on the
midway, such as the ever-popular "Upside-Down House" — customers of
"Thompson's Aerial Navigation Company" took a trip to the moon on a
thirty-seat spaceship named "Luna". The spaceship resembled a cross
between a dirigible and an excursion steamer, with the addition of
enormous red canvas wings that flapped like a bird's. The wings were
worked by a system of pulleys and the sensation of wind was created by
hidden fans. A series of moving canvas backdrops provided the effect
of clouds passing by and the earth dropping into the
distance. Lighting and sound effects added to the illusion.

[...]

Every half hour, at the sound of a gong and the rattle of anchor
chain, the "Luna" — "a fine steel airship of the latest pattern",
according to one newspaper — rocked from side to side and then rose
into the sky under the power of its beating wings. The passengers,
sitting on steamer chairs, see clouds floating by, then a model of
Buffalo far below, complete with the exposition itself and its
hundreds of blinking lights. The city soon falls into the distance as
the entire planet earth comes into view. Soon, the ship is surrounded
the twinkling stars of outer space. After surviving a terrific — and
spectacular — electrical storm the "Luna" and its passengers sets down
in a lunar crater.

Water is fascinating, for many reasons. It takes more energy to heat
than most substances. It's one of the few substances that expands
when it freezes. It forms complicated patterns in its liquid state,
which are just beginning to be understood. There are at least 18
kinds of ice, which exist at different temperatures and pressures.
Snowflakes are endlessly subtle.

And ice can form cages that trap other molecules! Here you see the 3
main kinds.

They're called clathrate hydrates. There's a lot under the sea
beds near the north and south pole - they contain huge amounts of
methane. At some moments in the Earth's history they may have erupted
explosively, causing rapid global warming.

But let's focus on the fun part: the geometry! Each of the 3 types of
clathrate hydrates is an architectural masterpiece.

'Type I' consists of water molecules arranged in two types of cages:
small and large. The small cage, shown in green, is dodecahedron.
It's not a regular dodecahedron, but it still has 12 pentagonal sides.
The large cage, shown in red, has 12 pentagons and 2 hexagons. The
two kinds of cage fit together into a repeating pattern where each
'unit cell' — each block in the pattern — has 46 water molecules.

Puzzle 1: This pattern is called the 'Weaire–Phelan
structure' Why is it famous, and what does it have to do with the
2008 Olympics?

You can see little balls in the cages. These stand for molecules that
can get trapped in the cages. They're politely called 'guests'.
The type I clathrate often holds carbon dioxide or methane as a guest.

'Type II' is again made of two types of cages: small and large.
The small cage is again a dodecahedron. The large cage, shown in
blue, has 12 pentagons and 6 hexagons. These fit together to form a
unit cell with 136 water molecules.

The type II clathrate tends to hold oxygen or nitrogen as a guest.

'Type H' is the rarest and most complicated kind of clathrate hydrate.
The 'H' stands for 'hexagonal', because it has a hexagonal crystal structure:
the other two are cubic.

It's built from three types of cages: small, medium and huge. The
small cage is again a dodecahedron, shown in green. The medium cage
— shown in yellow — has 3 squares, 6 pentagons and 3
hexagons as faces. The huge cage — shown in orange — has
12 pentagons and 8 hexagons. The cages fit together to form a unit
cell with 34 water molecules.

The type H clathrate is only possible when there are two different
guest gas molecules — one small and one very large, like butane
— to make it stable. People think there are lots of type H
clathrates in the Gulf of Mexico, where there are lots of heavy
hydrocarbons in the sea bottom.

Puzzle 2: how many cages of each kind are there in the type I
clathrate hydrate?

Puzzle 3: how many cages of each kind are there in the type II?

Puzzle 4: how many cages of each kind are there in the type H?

These last puzzles are easier than they sound. But here's one that's
a bit different:

Puzzle 5: the medium cage in the type H clathrate — shown in
yellow — has 3 squares, 6 pentagons and 3 hexagons as faces. Which of
these numbers are adjustable? For example: could we have a convex
polyhedron with a different number of squares, but the same number of
pentagons and hexagons?

Kepler, the guy who discovered that planets go in ellipses around the
Sun, was in love with geometry. Among other things, he tried to
figure out how to tile the plane with regular pentagons (dark blue)
and decagons (blue-gray). They fit nicely at a corner... but he
couldn't get it to work.

Then he discovered he could do better if he also used 5-pointed stars!

Can you tile the whole plane with these three shapes? No! The
picture here is very tempting... but if you continue you quickly run
into trouble. It's an impossible dream.

However, Kepler figured out that he could go on forever if he also
used overlapping decagons, which he called 'monsters'. Look at this
picture he drew:

If he had worked even harder, he might have found the Penrose tilings,
or similar things discovered by Islamic tiling artists. Read the
whole story here:

How did Kepler fall in love with geometry? He actually started as a
theologian. Let me quote the story as told in the wonderful blog
The Renaissance
Mathematicus:

Kepler was born into a family that had known better times, his mother
was an innkeeper and his father was a mercenary. Under normal
circumstances he probably would not have expected to receive much in
the way of education but the local feudal ruler was quite advanced in
his way and believed in providing financial support for deserving
scholars. Kepler whose intelligence was obvious from an early age won
scholarships to school and to the University of Tübingen where he
had the luck to study under Michael Mästlin one of the very few
convinced Copernican in the later part of the 16th century. Having
completed his BA Kepler went on to do a master degree in theology as
he was a very devote believer and wished to become a theologian.
Recognising his mathematical talents and realising that his religious
views were dangerously heterodox, they would cause him much trouble
later in life, his teacher, Mästlin, decided it would be wiser to
send him off to work as a school maths teacher in the Austrian
province.

Although obeying his superiors and heading off to Graz to teach
Protestant school boys the joys of Euclid, Kepler was far from happy
as he saw his purpose in life in serving his God and not Urania (the
Greek muse of astronomy). After having made the discovery that I will
shortly describe Kepler found a compromise between his desire to serve
God and his activities in astronomy. In a letter to Mästlin in
1595 he wrote:

I am in a hurry to publish, dearest teacher, but not for my benefit. I
am devoting my effort so that these things can be published as quickly
as possible for the glory of God, who wants to be recognised from the
Book of Nature. Just as I pledged myself to God, so my intention
remains. I wanted to be a theologian, and for a while I was
anguished. But, now see how God is also glorified in astronomy,
through my efforts.

So what was the process of thought that led to this conversion from a
God glorifying theologian to a God glorifying astronomer and what was
the discovery that he was so eager to publish? Kepler.s God was a
geometer who had created a rational, mathematical universe who wanted
his believers to discover the geometrical rules of construction of
that universe and reveal them to his glory. Nothing is the universe
was pure chance or without meaning everything that God had created had
a purpose and a reason and the function of the scientist was to
uncover those reasons. In another letter to Mästlin Kepler asked
whether:

you have ever heard or read there to be anything, which devised an
explanation for the arrangement of the planets? The Creator undertook
nothing without reason. Therefore, there will be reason why Saturn
should be nearly twice as high as Jupiter, Mars a little more than the
Earth, [the Earth a little more] than Venus and Jupiter, moreover,
more than three times as high as Mars.

The discovery that Kepler made and which started him on his road to
the complete reform of astronomy was the answer to both the question
as to the distance between the planets and also why there were exactly
six of them: as stated above, everything created by God was done for a
purpose.

On the 19th July 1595 Kepler was explaining to his students the
regular cycle of the conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter, planetary
conjunctions played a central role in astrology. These conjunctions
rotating around the ecliptic, the apparent path of the sun around the
Earth, created a series of rotating equilateral triangles. Suddenly
Kepler realised that the inscribed and circumscribed circles generated
by his triangles were in approximately the same ratio as Saturn.s
orbit to Jupiter's. Thinking that he had found a solution to the
problem of the distances between the planets he tried out various
two-dimensional models without success. On the next day a flash of
intuition provided him with the required three-dimensional solution,
as he wrote to Mästlin:

I give you the proposition in words just as it came to me and at that
very moment: "The Earth is the circle which is the measure of
all. Construct a dodecahedron round it. The circle surrounding that
will be Mars. Round Mars construct a tetrahedron. The circle
surrounding that will be Jupiter. Round Jupiter construct a cube. The
circle surrounding it will be Saturn. Now construct an icosahedron
inside the Earth. The circle inscribed within that will be
Venus. Inside Venus inscribe an octahedron. The circle inscribed
inside that will be Mercury."

This model, while approximately true, is now considered completely
silly! We no longer think there should be a simple geometrical
explanation of why planets in our Solar System have the orbits they
do.

So: a genius can have a beautiful idea in a flash of inspiration and
it can still be wrong.

But Kepler didn't stop there! He kept working on planetary orbits
until he noticed that Mars didn't move in a circle around the Sun. He
noticed that it moved in an ellipse! Starting there, he found the
correct laws governing planetary motion... which later helped Newton
invent classical mechanics.

So it pays to be persistent—but also not get stuck believing your
first good idea.

This galaxy is in trouble! It's falling into a large cluster of
galaxies, pulled by their gravity. You can see this in 3 ways:

The reddish disk of dust and gas is bent. There aren't many atoms
between galaxies, but there are still some. So the galaxy is moving
through the wind of integalactic space! And it's having trouble
holding onto the loosely bound dust and gas near its edge. They're
getting blown away.

The blue disk of stars is not bent. It extends beyond the disk of
dust and gas, which is where stars are formed. This suggests that the
dust and gas is being stripped from the galaxy after these stars were
formed!

Streamers of dust and gas can be seen trailing behind the moving
galaxy — near the top. On the other hand, the blue stars near the
leading edge of the galaxy have no dust and gas left to hide them.

This phenomenon is called 'ram pressure stripping', and it can kill a
galaxy, shutting down the production of new stars. Here we are seeing
it damage the galaxy NGC 4402, which is currently falling into the
Virgo cluster — a cluster of galaxies about 65 million light years
away.

Apparently there's about 1 atom per cubic centimeter in our galaxy —
on average, though some regions are vastly more dense than others.
But in the space between galaxies in clusters it's more like 1/1000 of
that. Not much! But enough to kill off the formation of new star
systems, life, civilizations...

The photo was taken at the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope on Kitt Peak,
which is fitted with some 'adaptive optics' to compensate for the
jittery motion of the image due to variable atmospheric conditions and
telescope vibrations.

It's a bit hard to find figures for the density of the intergalactic
medium. I see stuff that says: 1 atom per liter for the intergalactic
gas in clusters, 1 atom per cubic meter as the overall average for the
whole universe. One fun thing about space is that while it seems like
vacuum to us, its density ranges by many orders of magnitude... so
it's actually much more varied than, say, the difference between air
and solid lead!

Yes, air is about 1 kg/m3 and lead is about 10,000
kg/m3, a factor of 104. But within our galaxy,
the density of the interstellar medium easily ranges between
10-4 and 106 atoms per cubic centimeter, a
factor of 1010. And the average density of the Universe is
10-6 atoms per cubic centimeter. So what we naively call 'outer
space' is a bunch of vastly different media, whose densities vary by
at least a factor of a trillion!

Hewlett-Packard was once at the cutting edge of technology. Now they
make most of their money selling servers, printers, and ink... and
business keeps getting worse. They've shed 40,000 employees since
2012. Soon they'll split in two: one company that sells printers and
PCs, and one that sells servers and information technology services.

The second company will do something risky but interesting. They're
trying to build a new kind of computer that uses chips based on
memristors rather than transistors, and that uses optical
fibers rather than wires to communicate between chips. It could
make computers much faster and more powerful. But nobody knows if it
will really work.

The picture shows memristors on a silicon wafer. But what's a
memristor? Quoting the MIT Technology Review:

Perfecting the memristor is crucial if HP is to deliver on that
striking potential. That work is centered in a small lab, one floor
below the offices of HP's founders, where Stanley Williams made a
breakthrough about a decade ago.

Williams had joined HP in 1995 after David Packard decided the company
should do more basic research. He came to focus on trying to use
organic molecules to make smaller, cheaper replacements for silicon
transistors. After a few years, he could make devices with the right
kind of switchlike behavior by sandwiching molecules called rotaxanes
between platinum electrodes. But their performance was maddeningly
erratic. It took years more work before Williams realized that the
molecules were actually irrelevant and that he had stumbled into a
major discovery. The switching effect came from a layer of titanium,
used like glue to stick the rotaxane layer to the electrodes. More
surprising, versions of the devices built around that material
fulfilled a prediction made in 1971 of a completely new kind of basic
electronic device. When Leon Chua, a professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, predicted the existence of this device,
engineering orthodoxy held that all electronic circuits had to be
built from just three basic elements: capacitors, resistors, and
inductors. Chua calculated that there should be a fourth; it was he
who named it the memristor, or resistor with memory. The device's
essential property is that its electrical resistance—a measure
of how much it inhibits the flow of electrons—can be altered by
applying a voltage. That resistance, a kind of memory of the voltage
the device experienced in the past, can be used to encode data.

HP's latest manifestation of the component is simple: just a stack of
thin films of titanium dioxide a few nanometers thick, sandwiched
between two electrodes. Some of the layers in the stack conduct
electricity; others are insulators because they are depleted of oxygen
atoms, giving the device as a whole high electrical
resistance. Applying the right amount of voltage pushes oxygen atoms
from a conducting layer into an insulating one, permitting current to
pass more easily. Research scientist Jean Paul Strachan demonstrates
this by using his mouse to click a button marked "1" on his computer
screen. That causes a narrow stream of oxygen atoms to flow briefly
inside one layer of titanium dioxide in a memristor on a nearby
silicon wafer. "We just created a bridge that electrons can travel
through," says Strachan. Numbers on his screen indicate that the
electrical resistance of the device has dropped by a factor of a
thousand. When he clicks a button marked "0," the oxygen atoms retreat
and the device's resistance soars back up again. The resistance can be
switched like that in just picoseconds, about a thousand times faster
than the basic elements of DRAM and using a fraction of the
energy. And crucially, the resistance remains fixed even after the
voltage is turned off.
Getting this to really work has not been easy! On top of that,
they're trying to use silicon photonics to communicate between chips -
another technology that doesn't quite work yet.

Still, I like the idea of this company going down in a blaze of glory,
trying to do something revolutionary, instead of playing it safe and
dying a slow death. As Dylan Thomas said:

I watched "The Lives of Others" last night and thought of you once
more. In fact, I think you were watching it with me. You know I know I
cannot be sure.

I want you to know that, although our mutual love is forbidden by your
professional obligations, I still feel a connection to you. I will
feel that connection long after you are gone.

Somehow, you know me better than I know myself. You have all of my
deleted histories, my searches, all those things I tried to keep
"incognito" right there in front of you. We have made love, even
though we've never touched or kissed. We have been friends, even
though I've never seen your face. Our relationship is as real as my
"real" life.

But this can never work between us. Please leave. I don't want to ask again.

I'll never forget you.

Love, 173.165.246.73

That's Corey Bertelsen's comment on this video of Holly Herndon's song "Home", from
her new album Platform. It's as good a review as any.

Holly Herndon takes a lot of ideas from techno music and pushes them
to a new level. She's working on a Ph.D. at the Center for Computer
Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford.

She said that as she wrote this song, she

started coming to terms with the fact that I was calling my inbox my
home, and the fact that that might not be a secure place. So it
started out thinking about my device and my inbox as my home, and then
that evolved into me being creeped out by that idea.

The reason why I was creeped out is because, of course, as Edward
Snowden enlightened us all to know, the NSA has been mass surveying
the U.S. population, among other populations. And so that put into
question this sense of intimacy that I was having with my device. I
have this really intense relationship with my phone and with my
laptop, and in a lot of ways the laptop is the most intimate
instrument that we've ever seen. It can mediate my relationships
— it mediates my bank account — in a way that a violin or
another acoustic instrument just simply can't do. It's really a
hyper-emotional instrument, and I spend so much time with this
instrument both creatively and administratively and professionally and
everything.

In short, her seemingly 'futuristic' music is really about the
present — the way we live now. If you like this song I
recommend another, which is more abstract and to me more beautiful.
It's called 'Interference':

There are over 100 such companies. This article focuses on one called
Candelia:

Ms. de Buyzer did not care that Candelia was a phantom operation. She
lost her job as a secretary two years ago and has been unable to find
steady work. Since January, though, she had woken up early every
weekday, put on makeup and gotten ready to go the office. By 9
a.m. she arrives at the small office in a low-income neighborhood of
Lille, where joblessness is among the highest in the country.

While she doesn't earn a paycheck, Ms. de Buyzer, 41, welcomes the
regular routine. She hopes Candelia will lead to a real job, after
countless searches and interviews that have gone nowhere.

"It's been very difficult to find a job," said Ms. de Buyzer, who like
most of the trainees has been collecting unemployment benefits. "When
you look for a long time and don't find anything, it's so hard. You
can get depressed," she said. "You question your abilities. After a
while, you no longer see a light at the end of the tunnel."

She paused to sign a fake check for a virtual furniture supplier, then
instructed Candelia's marketing department — a group of four
unemployed women sitting a few desks away — to update the company's
mock online catalog. "Since I've been coming here, I have had a lot
more confidence," Ms. de Buyzer said. "I just want to work."

In Europe, 53% of job seekers have been unemployed for over a year.
In Italy, the numbers is 61%. In Greece, it's 73%.

All this makes me wonder — yet again — what will happen if
robots and computers push people out of many kinds of jobs, creating a
lot of long-term unemployment. If we don't adapt wisely, what should
be a good thing could be a source of misery.

Perhaps the next step will be for these fake companies to start doing
business with each other, and make it possible for someone working at
one to get hired at another.

I would like a science fiction story that extrapolates this scenario
to ridiculous lengths. Frist these fake companies start paying their
employees fake money. Then, to make it more realistic, they decide
the employees can use this fake money to buy fake goods made by other
fake companies. And so on... eventually building a second 'fake economy'.

The problem is, so far the people at these fake companies only do
'bullshit jobs': writing memos, managing other employees, etc. A
fake pet food company makes ads for pet food, but they don't actually
make any pet food. So, I guess the fake salaries could only be used
to buy services of certain ethereal sort.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would
have advanced sufficiently by century's end that countries like Great
Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work
week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological
terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't
happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure
out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have
had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of
people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire
working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really
need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from
this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective
soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes' promised utopia — still being eagerly awaited in
the '60s — never materialise? The standard line today is that he
didn't figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice
between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we've collectively
chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a
moment's reflection shows it can't really be true. Yes, we have
witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and
industries since the '20s, but very few have anything to do with the
production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing
employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture
(and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the
course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic
servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed
dramatically. At the same time, "professional, managerial, clerical,
sales, and service workers" tripled, growing "from one-quarter to
three-quarters of total employment". In other words, productive jobs
have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you
count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in
India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a
percentage of the world population as they used to be).

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free
the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures,
visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of
the "service" sector as of the administrative sector, up to and
including the creation of whole new industries like financial services
or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like
corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources,
and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all
those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or
security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole
host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza
deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much
of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call "bullshit jobs".

It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for
the sake of keeping us all working.